(Not) Like it should be
by Yusagi
Summary: When a girl falls in love, there's a certain expectation as to how it should go. Sometimes nothing at all goes the way it's supposed to. Sakura POV one shot


_(Not) Like it should be_

When a girl poured out her heart to the boy she loved in the middle of the night under a full moon on an empty road, she wasn't supposed to watch him walk away as if it didn't matter. She wasn't supposed to wake up in the road the next morning, alone.

When a girl realized that she'd fallen in love, she wasn't supposed to spend the next three years alone, with only a photograph to remember a long-gone face with.

It's not the way it's supposed to be.

 _It's not the way it should be_.

When a girl finally reunited with a long lost friend, after years of growth and personal discovery, at the start of a new adventure, stronger and completely transformed from who they were before, she was supposed to find out for the second time that she'd fallen in love.

When an old friend returned after years of growing up and changing, she wasn't supposed to realize that nothing changed. The boy that used to want her attention as much as she wanted to take it away wasn't supposed to have gotten over her, and she wasn't supposed to realize that she still loved the one that was gone.

After a joyous reunion, she wasn't supposed to be alone anymore.

 _It wasn't right_

Reunions were supposed to be the moment she realized she loved someone, but she'd already known before she saw him again. The way her heart clenched when she looked up at him didn't surprise her at all.

There wasn't any realization in the eyes that had turned so cold since she'd last seen them.

When a girl realized the one she loved would never love her back, she was supposed to let go.

When she saw him smile at her as if no time passed at all, it made her heart hurt. It should have meant that everything changed, then. He was so very kind, so very happy, and so determined to make her happy.

She should have loved him, and the world should have changed because he bought her barbecue on a cold night like the one she'd spent alone.

She shouldn't have walked away from him with a heart still as cold as the eyes that had looked through her.

 _It's just a dream_

When a girl went to free the one she loved of his madness and herself of grief, he was supposed to fall gracefully to the ground, so that she could fall on her own blade and be with him in death, if not in life.

She wasn't supposed to hesitate. Her love should have reached through the darkness that consumed him if her grief couldn't.

All the things she'd believed as a child were fantasies. The stories that she'd heard and read when she dreamed of love didn't hold an ounce of truth, and in the end the only thing she had left to hold to her broken heart was a long-faded photograph.

When a girl tried to move on, her heart was supposed to mend.

The cracks that splintered through her heart grew only more with every moment she struggled to hold it together.

Eventually, every girl needed to grow up.

But a girl who grew into a woman never learned how to hurt any less.

 _It's not like the stories_

When a woman grown confessed her love in the middle of a battlefield to the man she'd never been able to stop loving, she stopped believing that it should change anything.

The man that she loved should have been overcome by the realization that her love endured throughout the pain and the darkness, and how much they both tried to extinguish it.

Without a heart

She shouldn't have been able to love at all.

 _But that's how it should be_

When a wife stood by the door awaiting a long-gone husband, he should have swept her off her feet, they should have run to each other across the small distance and caught each other in their arms.

He pressed his forehead to hers and kissed her with a gentleness as if he'd never been gone at all. She fell against him, and he buried his face in her hair without a word of urgency.

His fingers settled with hers in a way so comfortable and familiar now, it might have always been perfect, but when they walked it was rarely on the side that her hand could hold his.

It wasn't at all like the stories and the fantasies she'd had about how love should be when she was a child.

She thought, however it was like, that it was something better than any of them.

 _And it's just the beginning_


End file.
